The Staggering Safety of Living With Concealed Carry Holders Among Us

The Staggering Safety of Living With Concealed Carry Holders Among Us

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been called “paranoid” for carrying a gun or defending the 2nd Amendment I most certainly wouldn’t be driving around my beater of a truck.

This seems to be the fallback for anti-gun zealots, an accusation they feel is so self-evident that they don’t feel the need to back it up with evidence (which is good for them, because there’s no evidence to back it up).

Interestingly enough, this point always seems to be brought up when anti-gunners talk about their fear of the pro-gun community.

It seems to me as though we’re not the paranoid ones – they are.

Take for example this recent blog post by Huffington Post writer Carter Gaddis, that went viral, in which a father describes his instant fear and apprehension at seeing an NRA decal. Or there’s the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence encouraging their followers to (criminally) call the police on anyone they see with a firearm, whether open or conceal carried, to “protect the safety of your loved ones.”

But just to be sure I decided to run some numbers. What are the odds that their worst fear, a law-abiding gun owner snaps and decides to start murdering people, happens? How do those odds stack up against the odds that we may one day be the victims of a violent crime, a possible situation that is at the forefront of many gun-carrier’s minds?

Since we don’t have a national gun registry (thank God!) we don’t have nationwide numbers on the crime rates of citizens who legally own firearms. However, Texas does keep track of the crime rates of concealed carriers, and since we know for a fact that these individuals have passed a background check and kept a clean record, it provides us with an adequate benchmark.

That’s a rate of roughly .565/100,000.

But keep in mind, that’s the ratio of CHL holders who committed a murder. That is not the murder rate of Texan’s committed by CHL holders.

This is where it gets really interesting.

In 2013 Texas had 26,448,193 citizens. Of those, 4 people were murdered by a CHL holder. That puts the probability of being murdered in Texas by a CHL holder at a mind-blowing –

.0151/100,000

The national homicide rate (or probability of getting murdered)? 4.3/100,000. Only a 28,000% difference.
And we’re the ones you’re worried about?